This chapter serves as one of two epilogues to this volume. In it, María Elena García focuses on three main themes: (1) the authors’ encounter with Indigenous Studies; (2) the importance of engaging with Native ideas of affect; and (3) the significance of thinking with haunting and ghosts as central to reimagining the history of science in the Americas. García explores the possibilities and limitations of placing Indigenous Studies next to decolonial scholarship and reflects on how or if this approach offers transformative frameworks for writing about and practising the “human sciences.” She also offers some thoughts about the place and significance of the more-than-human in this book, with a particular focus on ghosts, spirits, bones, and other entities that haunt the history of the human sciences. Finally, García takes inspiration from theorists engaging in multisensorial analysis to consider the “structures of feeling” that were both part of the extractive and colonial mode of the human sciences, and that might also emerge once we center Indigenous Studies values like radical relationality, reciprocity, and accountability in our writing, teaching, and mentorship.

Over the last two decades, researchers have sought to understand whether and to what extent donor-conceived people are motivated to seek contact with donors and donor siblings. This chapter contributes to this literature by focusing on donor-conceived adults’ everyday experiences living with anonymity and absence across the life course. Drawing on the concept of ‘haunting’ and combining reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with Australian donor-conceived adults (N = 28) and vignettes of personal experience, I elucidate how anonymity and absence reshape flows between past, present and future, altering personhood and relationality. I argue that framing anonymity as an issue of the past (re)produces ongoing haunting and that reform without concomitant processes of truth-telling and redress represent an injustice to those who continue to live with the lingering impacts of such past conditions. More broadly, this work expands sociological conceptualisations of family by attending to how familial (non-)relationships shape belonging.

This chapter offers a reassessment of the contemporary feminist legacies of the late surrealist novel. Historically, scholarship has reached a moment where the late surrealist novels of Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) and Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) now operate as active intertexts. Such legacies have become manifest in a new generation of contemporary novelists who identify as feminist: Chloe Aridjis (b. 1971), Kate Bernheimer (b. 1966), Ali Smith (b. 1962), and Heidi Sopinka (b. 1971). A range of feminist-surrealist stylistics in the contemporary novel become apparent. Self-reflexive framing devices such as transcription (daydreaming) and lecturing (epistemology) enable protagonists to take control of their voice or destiny in Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (2001), Aridjis’s Book of Clouds (2009), and Smith’s Autumn (2016). Moreover, haunted texts and found objects serve as catalysts and/or disruptive plot devices in Sopinka’s The Dictionary of Animal Languages (2018) and Aridjis’s Asunder (2013) and Sea Monsters (2019). These novels mimic the surrealist techniques and the elderly characters found in Tanning’s Abyss/Chasm (1977/2004) and Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974). A comparative, intergenerational perspective ensures the historical authenticity of the surrealist novel, and acknowledges a critical inheritance of fictional, revisionary accounts of the avant-garde movement.

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer creators have intentionally deployed such Gothicisms for the sake of representing queerness. This chapter explores the conflicting purposes of horror’s depiction of queerness by reviewing several Gothic tropes as they appear in American horror texts, focusing specifically on monstrosity, vampirism, the asylum, medical body horror, and haunting.

Dickinson’s inability to tell the story of slavery is contrasted with M. NourbeSe Philip’s lifework Zong!, a book that attempts to listen to the missing, those who have been obliterated from the judicial archive or murdered in the Black Atlantic. Zong! is derived from a set of procedural constraints, using a legal summary of the Gregson vs. Gilbert decision – a case that determined whether slaves thrown overboard could be claimed as insured goods – to produce sequences of dispersed poems, associated texts and performances. Philip compares these procedural constraints to entering the hold, and her acts of linguistic selection and discarding to those of the slave masters. This radical attempt to restage the violences of history and recover the lost are complicated by her contention that the lyric poet must act as a bridge between the individual and the group. This chapter consider how Philip’s practice moves from page-based experiments with formal constraints, through an antagonistic relationship to the colonial lyric, into collective performance. It considers the significance of re-enactment and ritual in Philip’s work to channel the voices of the ancestors and disrupt the silences of the archive.

This chapter looks at how the postcolonial negotiates the Gothic. Both are informed by a degree of suspicion about European Enlightenment rationalism and its constructs, but the Gothic also depends on colonial European elements – the Devil as Black, the Oriental artefact, obeah – for its effects. The postcolonial Gothic needs these effects – for the scream, as I argue, is central to the Gothic – but cannot use the same instruments because, by definition, postcolonialism adopts a critical and questioning attitude to colonial European discourses as well. By looking at a number of texts, especially the Caribbean Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the South African André Brink’s Devil’s Valley, the Australian Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, and the British-Indian Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, I show how the Gothic villain or the Gothic secret is manipulated by postcolonialism to combine its critical perspectives with the Gothic’s generic requirements.

This chapter considers the ways in which Gothic as a mode interacts with queer history generally and with the history of AIDS and queer communities more specifically within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century contexts. This chapter examines the elision of the histories of Gothic, AIDS and queer sexuality in four texts that marked different stages of the evolution of the AIDS discourse. The first half of the chapter focuses on individual and collective community trauma in the first decade of the AIDS pandemic as represented in Tony Scott’s 1983 arthouse vampire film The Hunger and Todd Haynes’s 1991 seminal New Queer Cinema triptych, Poison. The second half of this chapter considers the ongoing haunting from the first decade of AIDS trauma in the face of a devastating disease and the initial scapegoating of the queer community as the site of contagion. These hauntings are depicted in John Greyson’s 1993 AIDS musical satire, Zero Patience and Lilly and Lana Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski’s 2015–18 trans-genre television show, Sense8.

Scott’s attention to endangered animals, birds and plants as well as to processes of extinction is explored in this chapter. Discussion evaluates how awareness of the precarity attending reduced biodiversity in the nineteenth century, as represented in Scott’s historical fiction, can inform understanding of the drivers of similar crises in our own time. The case studies address problems arising from fetishized or idealistic views of Scotland’s ‘wilder’ environments. Enquiry also focuses on ecologies in places that are marginal to, or remote from, urban centres, while endangered human communities such as those of the Highlands before the late eighteenth-century clearances and others that followed are shown to be integral parts of threatened environments. Wolves, beavers, raptors, wild cattle and wild cats are among the species considered. The problems that attend rewilding and conservation strategies are discussed with attention to what is not, or cannot be, preserved or replaced.

This chapter explores the pervasive ways in which Gothic forces and affiliations appear in Dickens’s writings. The word ‘Gothic’ is rare in his work but an awareness of Gothic tropes, plottings and conventions is vital to understanding it. Gothic is used in highly innovative ways: to explore asymmetrical power relations of many sorts; to limit-test the idea of the ‘human’; and as radical social critique. The diabolical and uncanny are particularly powerful modes, and Dickens is pioneering both in his use of ‘virtual’ Gothic in A Christmas Carol and in the creation of ‘paranoid Gothic’ in the violent same-sex eroticism of Our Mutual Friend and the Mystery of Edwin Drood. Gothic is also an essential component of such scenes as Miss Havisham’s resemblance to ‘waxwork and skeleton’ in Great Expectations and Fagin’s and Monks’s appearance at the sleeping Oliver Twist’s window. The chapter discusses a wide range of Gothic presences in these and other works, concluding with a discussion of Dicken’s remarkable late essay ‘Nurse’s Stories’ (1863), a complex ‘meta-Gothic’ reflection on uncanny repetition and its simultaneously comic and diabolical power in subjective experience and narration.

Tropes of Indigeneity both conceal and expose the tangle of land, labor, and race in the American southern context. This introduction poses Indian Removal as the underacknowledged historical thunderclap, akin to the Civil War, after which the South struggled permanently to regenerate its self-conception. In the narratives of modern and contemporary white southerners, the story of the southeastern Indian is inextricable from the white South’s story about itself - a structure built on preoccupations with loss, dispossession, sovereignty, and community. The Indian motif marks the passage from the white southern specular self to its socially constituted version, and the maintenance of that self is, in many ways, dependent on the internalization of an elaborate Indigenous fiction. What that narrative both covers over and exposes is haunting in more ways than we have realized: it is, finally, a revelatory model of not just settler colonial extermination but of the vacancies, desires, and horrors of a modernity constructed on the twin phantoms of materialism and racialism.

The final chapter brings the various threads of the book together and revisits hegemony and its afterlives in Egypt through the concept of haunting. I trace some of the ways in which hegemony and its afterlives fed into the 2011 revolution and ask why it was so important for each ruling class to portray itself as either a rupture or a continuity. Haunting allows me to lay out both how these different projects were formed and how they seeped into one another – in other words, how some projects haunted others. I posit that Nasserism set the terms of the political and economic debate in contemporary Egypt; the projects that came after consistently found that they had to work within these terms – or face serious crises. After discussing the concept of haunting, the chapter explores Nasserism and its promises as well as the afterlives of Nasserism that haunt contemporary Egypt, particularly in relation to economic liberalism. I then turn to the question of mastery and the ways in which Nasserism’s attempt to master the future also haunt us in important ways, and why, to become truly free, we must think about the future in ways that do not centre mastery or mastering. The book ends with Fanon and his call to create a new world – one in which all of us are free and in which decolonization becomes a reality rather than a dream.

This chapter addresses the ways through which performance can highlight the body as a site of memory, history and forgetting. Mary Devenport O’Neill’s Bluebeard (1933), Eva Gore-Booth’s The Buried Life of Deirdre (published 1930) and Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996), all offer ghostly performances which stage the unsettling effects of the past as it resurfaces in the present. The plays address both individual memory and the cultural memory of female experience as defined by limiting myths of an idealized and domesticated passive Irish femininity. The haunted body offers the means for an examination of the processes of memory and history as layers of somatic memories which are exposed and reperformed. The chapter draws on Joseph Roach’s concepts of surrogation and genealogies of performance to explore how the haunted bodies in these plays offer a genealogy of performance that exposes the body as the site which bears the consequences of the disavowal of violent pasts. The performing body engages with the resurfacing of that which has been repressed and forgotten, and this offers the means to address the potentially destabilizing and uncanny effects of performing elided pasts.